What Galileo and Jeff Bezos Have in Common

ROBERT PLANT: Leadership is often defined through a style: charismatic; transformational or authentic to name just a few. However, it is increasingly important for firms to be led by a polymath. In essence, someone who has great and varied learning over complex bodies of knowledge. This can then be used to solve equally complex tasks within the business. Famous historic polymaths include da Vinci, Galileo, and Francis Bacon; however business leaders such as Gates, Jobs and Bezos also possess this quality.

Todays’ corporate leadership is too frequently still populated by monomaths, functional experts in single fields; corporate boards are dominated by finance and law monomaths, and worryingly homogenous. This, however, is not the case for many firms in the technology field, Gates, Jobs and Bezos are visionaries in business, but they all possess deep understanding of knowledge sets that they weave together, creating an intellectual fabric from which business insight and acumen propagates.

Steve Jobs’ broad life experiences and skills included calligraphy, design, Buddhism and of course technology. These combined to not only to make him a polymath but give him “fluid intelligence,” a term applicable to people who can solve unique and novel problems with attractive counterintuitive solutions. This is exemplified by the approach Jobs took to product creation. For him, the designers of the MP3 player were solving the problem of playing MP3 files, a monomath’s solution; while the iPod was a polymath’s catalytic solution that would transform the life style of its user, Apple’s customers.

Leaders need to encourage and cultivate their polymaths. By allowing these high performers to go on sabbaticals outside their normal areas of responsibility, hone multidisciplinary expertise, and extend their corpus of knowledge, firms can leverage their rare polymath talent to good effect in a monomathical world.

Robert Plant (@drrobertplant) is an associate professor at the School of Business Administration, University of Miami, in Coral Gables, Fla.